Speaking Clown to Power: Can We Resist the Historic Compromise of Neoliberal Art? GREGORY SHOLETTE

03_Cronin pg27-54 11/19/10 12:48 PM Page 27 Speaking Clown to Power: Can We Resist the Historic Compromise of Neoliberal Art? GREGORY SHOLETTE Clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests.1 he transformation of the postwar welfare or “Keynesian” state economy into its current, neoliberal form has dramatically altered the relationship Tbetween labour, capital, and the state. As noted in the introduction to this book, globalization, privatization, flexible work schedules, financial schemes, and hyper-deregulated markets have plunged many individuals into a world of precarious labour, in which one’s very sense of “being” is in a constant, yet indeterminate state of risk. In one stroke, the 2008 global financial meltdown illuminated the details of risk society—painfully for many (profitably for a small group of others). Not surprisingly, some look to culture for a modicum of critical insight if not an entirely different vision of life and labour. The work of artists, it is alleged, provides self-knowledge and sometimes utopian alter- natives precisely because cultural creativity is said to be a unique form of sen- suous, nonproductive, self-directed, and therefore “autonomous,”labour. Art appears to exist separately from the “cultural pollution”of everyday commerce. But given that art is also a form of labour, is it not also affected by the recent changes in working conditions described above? In an age of unmediated market penetration that philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as “Bare Life,”is it still possible to believe that art and artistic labour represent a special form of production, set apart from the demands of capital?2 And yet, on the other hand, if artists are caught up in the new forces of entrepreneurship and instability, what becomes of the link between aesthetics and political activism that was a significant feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture? Has it been jeopardized, or simply aban- 27 03_Cronin pg27-54 11/19/10 12:48 PM Page 28 28 Imagining Resistance doned altogether? And if the mainstream art world has indeed forsaken its role as society’s insubordinate critic, then from what overlooked corner or bedraggled intellectual and artistic shantytown will the challenge to neoliberal hegemony emerge, assuming cultural resistance is even still a possibility today? Or perhaps that challenge already exists and in such a way that we are reminded of Socrates’ ancient warning about the subversive power of the imitative arts as outlined in Plato’s Republic? If a politics (and perhaps also aesthetics) of production exists that is distinct from a politics of representation, where would it be located? The second half of this chapter seeks to answer that question by looking at the recent wave of self-institutionalized and typically interventionist artists’ col- lectives—some made up of trained artists and others mixing political activists with cultural professionals—who appear to recognize their own redundancy and excess productivity by critically, even playfully, projecting an image of power well beyond their actual size and stature. We might think of these informal groups who mimic authority using hyperbolic representation as one part of a previously invisible cultural mass, or what I have elsewhere described as kind of artistic “dark matter”: the far larger surplus of socially generated cultural productivity—including the “normal” excess of profes- sional artists as well as many informal, amateurs—that invisibly stabilizes the symbolic and economic citadel of the “serious” art world. Thanks in part to the very forces of neoliberalization under discussion in this book—globalization, precarious labour, digital and cellular technologies, social networking—and no doubt accelerated by the global, financial contraction that began a few years ago, this shadowy absence/presence has suddenly been forced into view, in turn affecting not only traditional notions of labour and management but also, in so far as these forces call into question the arbi- trary lines demarcating what is and what is not “really art,” threatening to undermine long-held aesthetic norms and the art world institutions built to protect them.3 “Just In Time” Creativity? Clearly, a change of great magnitude has taken place over the past several decades regarding the place of the artist in society. For one thing, the profile of the artist as radical or anti-social outsider—an impression that became almost ubiquitous in the 1960s and early 1970s—has been dramatically soft- ened of late. A new, affirmative image of artist as entrepreneur is even making its way around business circles as free-market economists and neoliberal 03_Cronin pg27-54 11/19/10 12:48 PM Page 29 Speaking Clown to Power Gregory Sholette 29 policy wonks praise the very qualities that once pushed artists to the social margins—deviation from standards and routines, non-linear problem solv- ing, and outright contempt for authority and work itself. It is an unortho- dox outlook that has paradoxically become the new “creative” engine of twenty-first-century capitalism.4 Cultural work can be seen as the fixation, even fetish, of the so-called “new economy.”One outcome of this new-found adulation is that all workers are being measured by standards of cultural labour: they must produce creatively, even at times “artistically,”with imag- inative panache, or what Paolo Virno calls a “virtuosic performance,”other- wise they suffer the consequences. Ironically, such consequences amount to sharing the same fate as most “failed” artists: a one-way ticket to the very un-creative abyss of the office cubicle, or part-time service work.5 What then becomes of the avant-garde’s renowned rebelliousness when the movers and shakers of capitalism 2.0 cheerfully advise “Never hire anyone without an aberration in their background,”6 or when former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Hoving proclaims,“Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!”7 Curiously, despite continued poor working conditions for artists in the deregulated economy, there has been an ever-increasing number of individuals who identify themselves as working artists. How and why is this tak- ing place, particularly given that the relation of artists to their market has always been one of excess and that this “glut of artists” (as historian Carol Duncan pointed out in 1983), is the “normal condition of the art world?”8 Certainly it poses the question: does it matter how politically subversive, feminist, queer, black, or radical the content of your visual production is if most artists belong to an overeducated army of surplus labourers who— while occasionally feeding imagery to the “Society of the Spectacle”—are by and large disconnected from the mainstream cultural experience of the larger population? This asymmetry and isolation is all the more remarkable today given the size that the global art market has reached even as it continues to widen the gap between a few successful artists and the many who fail, much like the neoliberal economy in general. (Nor has this structural disparity sig- nificantly slowed following the so-called “great recession.”) What might come of increasingly obvious adulation of cultural labour is not merely an academic question. For anyone who believes artistic representation preserves, or should preserve, an impulse for freedom and a degree of social dissent, the very possibility of a détente between artists and neoliberalism must be greeted with alarm. In order to address this question of historic 03_Cronin pg27-54 11/19/10 12:48 PM Page 30 30 Imagining Resistance compromise we will first need a snapshot of cultural working conditions in the deregulated economy. In addition we will need to speculate on just what makes free-market capitalists so interested in artists and to ask: what if any- thing can be done to save the “soul” of critical artistic practices from neoliberal enterprise culture? This chapter begins by tracing an apparent paradox: why have the ranks of artistic workers swelled in many nations despite the inherent instability of that profession and the rise of precarious labour in general over the past thirty years? Several short comparisons follow, contrast- ing post-1980s “enterprise culture” with the frequently radical art of the 1960s and 1970s. These comparisons are made without ignoring the fact that the lat- ter took shape under the more generous conditions of administered culture: Adorno’s term for the managed institutions of the cold-war’s “culture indus- try.”The final section concludes with an outline of an emergent aesthetics of resistance that appears to manifest itself not at the level of artistic forms or techniques but at the level of the organizational and social imaginary. “Citadel Culture” In every nation touched by the combined forces of deregulation and privatization, governments have all but given up their former role as an interme- diary between the worker’s security and the business sector’s drive to raise production and lower labour costs (see, for example, the ongoing drive to pri- vatize health care, the proposed introduction of punitive copyright legisla- tion, and the dismantling of social services over the last decade in Canada).9 The neoliberal state does not even pretend to offer full, meaningful employ- ment for those who seek it. The result is the redistribution of risk from the collective (state, nation, group, society) to each isolated individual. As if to conspire in this humiliation, new labour-saving technology and access to cheap labour (and also slave labour) abroad have accelerated the normal rate of redundancy in the workforce.10 Shorn from both the real and imaginary social safety net, we stand before the raw, unmediated needs of capital, our economic success or failure the only measure of who we are.

Load more